1854 Wyandotte Village | Ford City | Glenwood & Mt. Carmel | South Wyandotte
30. Ford-Bacon House and Bacon Memorial Library, Queen Anne, Malcomson and Higginbotham, Built 1897, 42nd US President William Clinton speech here in 1996
The Edward Ford – Mary Bacon House has architectural significance as a large, Queen-Anne brick design of Detroit architectural firm Malcomson and Higginbotham. It has historical significance as the residence of two Wyandotte business and civic leaders.
Edward Ford, president of the Michigan Alkali Company (later to become the Wyandotte Chemical Company and even later BASF) constructed this house for his wife Carrie in 1897. Ford, the son of chemical magnate Captain John B. Ford, lived here for only a few years before moving to Toledo in 1900 to follow the glass industry concentrating there.
In 1902, Mark and Mary Ford Bacon, Edward’s daughter, occupied the house. Mr. Bacon was elected to Congress in November 1916. When the US declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, Congressman Bacon was one of the few who voted against the war. At a special election on November 6, 1917, Bacon was recalled. Following the death of her husband in 1942, Mary Ford Bacon bequeathed the house to the Wyandotte Board of Education for educational use. Today it is the Bacon Memorial Library.
U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton visited Wyandotte on August 27, 1996 for a stop during his re-election campaign where he gave a nationally televised speech on literacy education from the porch of the Ford-Bacon House facing towards Biddle Ave. His train stopped at the same historic Oak Street depot used by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt when he visited town in 1902.
Important architectural features include hip-roof, cross-gables, and light brown and red painted sandstone trim. It has projecting tapered gables, a 2 story side bay, square brick chimneys, gabled dormers, and a rear three-story round arched bell tower.
Details include a hipped roof open porch, scrolled brackets and dentils under the roofline, a leaded glass transom, and scrolled iron gates in basement windows.
Listed on State Register of Historic Sites, 2/19/1987.
Listed on National Register of Historic Places, 12/1/1997.
Wyandotte Historical Society plaque accepted June 7, 1991.